Robotics startups Gecko secures $40M to inspect industrial equipment and prevent accidents with wall climbing robots

Every year, over $100 billion is spent on industrial maintenance. Traditionally, these inspections were done by humans resulting in death and injury. Enter Gecko Robotics, a tech startup that makes these dangerous jobs safer. Gecko Robotics develops and operates robots to automate infrastructure inspections. Gecko is focusing on industrial plant inspections using non-destructive testing technology.

Today, Gecko announced it has raised $40 million in venture funding to inspect industrial equipment and prevent accidents. The deal comes as more large industrial corporations are turning to artificial intelligence and robotics startups to leverage new technology and gain new business insights.

In 2018, Gecko Robotics raised $7 million dollars in Series A funding led by the famous firm Founders Fund, a California based venture capital firm that invests in “revolutionary” technology. The Westly Group, Mark Cuban, and Justin Kan were also key contributors. Its revenue exploded by five time in 2018, and the company began scaling up in size. 2018 started with only 10 employees but grew to 60 by the new year.

Founded in 2016 by Jake Loosararian and Troy Demmer, Gecko Robotics makes wall climbing robots for industrial inspections. Gecko Robotics protects and maintains civilization’s most critical infrastructure through machines and platforms. Inspections with Gecko are faster, safer, and provide plants with the data to be proactive about the health of their assets. Gecko is funded by Y Combinator and other notable investors.

Gecko Robotics Team (Credit: Gecko Robotics)

Gecko’s operators, certified level I, II, and III NDT inspectors, control wall climbing inspection robots to perform non-destructive testing on tanks, boilers, scrubbers, piping and more. Using different inspection payloads, the robots can inspect wall thickness, cracking, pitting, and other forms of degradation. With continuous data capture, robots can collect 1000x more information while also performing the inspection on average 10x faster than previous methods.

Below is a video overview of Gecko robots.